Empathy for Hip-Huggers Not Always Reciprocated

Don’t bother me about “hot pants”. I’m still trying to understand hip-huggers.

Actually, it’s simple. Hip-huggers are nothing more than slacks designed by a guy with no sense of humor for a girl with hips like an 11-year-old boy.

Hot pants are designed by the same guy who has now developed a sense of humor.

I happen to have enormous empathy for hip-huggers. They do not reciprocate. This probably has something to do with the fact that even when I was 11 I did not have hips like an 11-year-old boy.

It is possible to get a smashingly beautiful pair of hip-huggers to fit. However the waistline then gaps alarmingly like an ebullient kangaroo with a incipient case of heartburn.

A manufacturer of hip-huggers used to like to advertise that it was impossible not to have a good time while wearing ladies’ pants of his design.

I’ve always wanted to answer.

No, actually, just last Friday while bailing six inches of water out of the bathroom I felt like Frieda the Frump in pants of your design.

I had a perfectly ghastly time at a cocktail party in hip-huggers of your design because I couldn’t sit down and didn’t dare try a French pastry.

As a matter of fact I was wearing a pair of hip-huggers you designed last week when the garage mechanic called me some very unflattering names and charged me $10 to tune the motor of my car, which he also called some very unflattering names.

I happened to feel exactly like Greta the Gruesome as I was seen chasing our only two remaining trash cans up the street on a windy morning, wearing the same hip-huggers.

You name it, baby, and I’ve had the experiences rated “U” for “unhappy”-- wearing pants of your design. Cassandra at the dentist, Miranda at the movies Saturday with 37 Brownies, Minnie Mouse at the hairdresser’s with nothing but a bent safety pin and one earring in her wallet. Sophie the Sorrowful at the kindergarten party, the only mother in the room who hadn’t remembered to bake cupcakes.

One teen-age daughter now “ages” her hip-huggers properly by sitting in the bathtub while wearing them and then hanging them up to drip-dry all over the bathroom tile.

Of course they shrink, sometimes they really shrink! Then she sews braid around the hems to lengthen them and plays an extra set of tennis that day to take off a pound.

The other teen-age daughter has what is known as “illusion” hips. One her, hip-huggers float magically over the hip bone as though propelled by some magic. On top of this, her favorites attire is sloppy sweatshirts or sloppy undershirts, preferably too big or too small, paint-stained, and timeworn.

At South Beach on Martha's Vineyard, 1971

Yesterday the Baron and I went to the ice-cream store for milk and eggs. (Well, some people go to Monaco, and some to Miami; everyone has to do their own thing.)

Two beautiful people were emerging from their EKG ( ot was it MKG), I always get mixed up about those things!). One had short curly golden hair and a turtleneck sweater. The other had a shaggy golden mop and was wearing lavender corduroy bell-bottoms.

“Which one is the girl?” I whispered.

“Are you kidding!” answered the Baron, whose eyes never left the hip-huggers for a moment. Then I knew, for the first time, what a girl really looks like with the hips of an 11-year-old boy.

And let me tell you something. I’ve been so depressed ever since!

So I just trotted back home and pulled on my favorite pair of jeans and sat down in a full bathtub of warm water to read the new issue of Life.

There was a picture of Sophia Loren in a midi. I began to feel a little better.

There was a picture of Samantha Effar in hot pants. I had an immediate relapse.

I crawled dripping out of the tub and went to sit dripping on the back porch. I began to think about how nice it would been to live in Elizabethan England and then I remembered no one ever drove small foreign cars while wearing hoopskirts.

Why don’t they go completely candid and call it “Women’s Fears Daily” instead of “Women’s Wear Daily”?

--July 4, 1971